Keystrokes for accents in other languages
So I am working on a website for the European Sociological Association’s Sociology of Emotions Research Group and I am constantly confronted with a Swedish name Asa, or rather Åsa. I have emailed back and forth with Åsa but I always hit reply so I don’t have to worry about how to make the accent mark. Now I really need to know and plus there are many other accented names that need to be entered.
Well I am a big believer in pronouncing and spelling names to the best of ones ability, no matter how challenging it may seem. I taught in CA and I never could quite get the Vietnamese names correct but I made it a point to try and ask and make sure they understood I thought it important out of respect. Well here I am in Europe and I am not able to type most of the names and I am learning French so I really need to learn how to do it.
It took a while to find the directions for Mac computers but I will give you an overview of the most commonly used accents in French and the keystrokes to achieve them.
ç= option +c makes the mark and then c again makes the c with the mark
é= option+e sets the accent and then e again to put it under the accent
à= option+the key to the left of the 1 with the tilde and then the a to place it below
è= option+ the key to the left of the 1 with the tilde and then the e to place it below.
æ=option+the key with the parentheses and apostrophe
œ=option+ the q
â=option+ the 6 key and then the letter a to place it below
€=option+shift
These are the basics. Would you like to know more? Tell me which ones and I can review them with you. I can also show you how to get a little keyboard viewer to open so you can see all the shortcuts. Happy typing.
Since I just finished reading the Historian I will now type Vlad ?epe?, although it doesn’t look as ominous as it did in the book when they wrote it. Who was Vlad ?epe??
I use a pc. Windows has an option for a US international keyboard that makes it pretty easy to type the accents. For example, to make é, you type the apostrophe followed by the e. To make ô, you type the carrot followed by an o. Apostrophe c gives you ç, open quotes plus u gives you ü, etc.
If you just want the apostrophe (or any other accent) by itself, you type the apostrophe (or the carrot or whatever) then the space bar, and you get ‘ and ` and ^ and ” all by themselves.
C’est un jeu d’enfant !
Well so much for the “Macs are easier to use” argument. It sounds more user friendly than the Mac keyboard for typing the accents. it’s not hard but it is not intuitive either.
First, a thank you to Walt . I never could think of the name of that ^ symbol.
If you don’t want to remember all the keystrokes, you can cheat and go to the Lexilogos site (http://www.lexilogos.com/clavier/francais.htm) and find a keyboard with the symbols for just about any language you might want to use.